Read the catalog essay for "The Joey of the Task Was Its Own Reward" by Jen Larsen

"The Joy of the Task"

There is no joy in writing. None. Endless books are
dedicated to the misery of writing and how to overcome the almost
insurmountable psychological barriers you throw up against the whole idea of
writing. How to drag yourself with clawed and bloodied hands on your belly
across a minefield paved with broken glass and broken dreams and self-hate,
waiting for any of those softly ticking bombs to tear you into a spray of meat
and bone and fountaining misery.

Writing is hard, and writers feel eternally sorry for
themselves. Writing is about discipline, writers say. There are a lot of pieces
of advice, small tiny winking diamonds of truth that writers flash and trade
around. It’s about putting your butt in the chair and doing the work. Write
every day. Writing is a muscle—it gets stronger with practice. Writers write. And writers who don’t write hate
themselves.

Writers hate themselves. Writers hate themselves because
they hate those aphorisms, and they hate themselves when they hear those
sturdy, cheerful slogans coming out of their own mouths, aimed at writer
friends or themselves in the mirror. Encouraging phrases that seem for brief
and shining moments, beautiful moments, the happiest moments in life, like
cradling a newborn made out of wild hope and incandescent possibility etc. and
then turn out to not be useful, not even a little bit, because writers write. And all the slogans in the world
don’t put words on the page for you.

Writing is terrifying. Like most, any, all creative work,
it’s an exercise in throwing yourself, your whole entire self, the beautiful
parts and the filthy parts and the shameful, degraded, messy, lonely sad and petrified
parts at a blank screen, a white sheet of totally empty paper, and trusting
that it’s enough to fill up all that space. That you won’t step back and look
at the mess you made and wish you had left bare and blank well enough alone,
because all that nothing is better than any part of you.

How do writers ever managed to write? How does anything get
done, ever? Eventually, you just have to. Or eventually you never do it again.

Writing is exhilarating—the actual physical act of it. The
reality of it. Falling the rhythm of your fingers on the keyboard or the swoop
of your pen on the paper. It becomes a meditation, and it feels easy once you’re
inside of it. Endless and effortless and better than most things. Everything
drops away. Your fear and your terror and your worry and your doubt and your
sorrow and your conviction that everything is broken in the world but
especially you—because this isn’t broken. This is building. This is creating
something that hadn’t been in the world before and couldn’t have been, without
you and your hand moving across the page and the words flying out behind you
like paper streamers.

There is joy in writing when you are inside it and then
there’s joy when you look at what you’ve done, a cautious optimism that it is
not all the worst things that have ever been committed to paper, a tiny
flickering hope that you managed to fight through the gouts of bloody
self-doubt and ignore, at least for a little while, the oh, so terrible
tragedies of your own weak and fluttering heart. There’s joy in accomplishment,
and for just a little awhile, it is everything and it is enough.